Star of live action Muslim Ms. Marvel adaptation turns to comics writing

Variety reports the actress Iman Vellani, star of the live action Muslim Ms. Marvel TV show, is now writing comics herself, and in partnership with a writer/publisher who prefers the dark:

Iman Vellani, known for playing Kamala Khan in “Ms. Marvel,” will make her solo comics writing debut with “Chachu,” a five-issue neo-noir miniseries illustrated by Marianna Ignazzi and colored by Jordie Bellaire, set for release from Image Comics and Tiny Onion on Aug. 5.

Set in 1979, the series follows Leila, a 19-year-old Pakistani-Canadian young woman with a love of film and pulp novels who travels to California to reconnect with her estranged uncle – a semi-retired private eye once celebrated for having married the starlet he was originally hired to find. When that same wife vanishes again, uncle and niece find themselves on an unplanned road-trip investigation, one that pushes Leila’s first taste of adulthood into a reckoning with family secrets and the myths both have built around their lives.

“I’ve always been deeply curious about comics as an art form because of their capacity to hold contradiction – arguably better than any other medium,” Vellani said. “That became especially meaningful to me while writing Chachu, which grew out of this tension between mourning my youth while I still have it, and an incessant urge to come of age already.”

[...] “Chachu” is being co-published with Tiny Onion, the independent production house founded by James Tynion IV, co-creator of “Something is Killing the Children” and “The Department of Truth,” which has been expanding beyond comics into film, animation, and video game development.

If it weren't for how she quite possibly upholds the Islamic propaganda the Muslim Ms. Marvel series was built on, this might be more interesting than it sounds, but coupled with how she's having her comic produced by Tynion, the leftist who dislikes capitalism and thinks the horror genre is greatest idea ever created, that's why this isn't something to be excited about. Also, what's this about comics holding "contradiction" better than other mediums? Even that's questionable and above all, trivial. Let's also not forget how attempts to translate the Muslim Ms. Marvel into live action have for the most part been a flop.

The speculator joke continues in the UK

The BBC announced more old pamphlets are being sold on auction over in Britain:

Two Marvel comic books have sold for a total of £11,440 at an auction house in Surrey.

A copy of the first edition of The Incredible Hulk, featuring the first appearance of the superhero, sold for £7,800 after going on auction at Ewbank's in Woking on Wednesday.

Another 1974 edition of the comic which features the first appearance of X-Men superhero Wolverine, also sold for £3,640.

The auction's big ticket item, a first edition of Amazing Spider-Man which featured the character's first appearance, failed to sell having been listed for between £10,000 and £15,000.

Well that's certainly amazing some buyers gave pause based on 5-digit sums, but this still isn't good there's consumers in Europe who're making a farce out of the medium by perpetuating the speculator nonsense that's been a sad staple in the USA for a long time. Why won't even they stop to consider this is only depriving many museums of history projects that would be better off stored under their auspices? And why won't the history community itself speak out about how the speculator market is doing more harm than good? It's totally depressing nobody cares.

Is Image's Chew comic going to be adapted to TV?

K945 reports an Image comic from the past decade, Chew, appears to be in development for a TV show:

I've never been shy about professing my love of Louisiana comic book creator Rob Guillory. I've said it once, and I'll say it again - he's a good guy, a really good human, and a GREAT artist. Whether he's drawing, writing, or doing both at the same time, he just has this knack of building believable & relatable worlds around truly outlandish and unbelievable ideas. The man is gifted.

[...] One property that I thought was ready made for television is Chew. Look, I get it, I'm clearly biased and a huge, huge fan. But, taking myself out of it, Chew is a pretty important piece of work. It won Eisner Awards, Harvey Awards, it is one of the most successful creator owned books of all-time...and it's so unique and inventive, there's nothing else like it on the market. Which is a rarity in today's world.

Way back in the day, Chew was going to be turned into an animated series starring Steven Yeun and Robin Williams. However, Robin Williams passed away during production and the project just never came together or saw the light of day. Well, now, it seems like Chew is getting a second chance at life.

[...] Rob and John Layman are throwing it back to the days of newspapers and magazines and releasing Chew as a serialized, one-page comic strip being released monthly and the new Comics! The Magazine.

This news might've been okay if it weren't for how far-left Layman happens to be, and if that's what he's like, Guillory can't be far behind. Besides, just because Chew won awards galore, does that alone make it worth adapting?

As for the late actor Williams, if that's whom they're talking about, he died by suicide, sadly enough, though I had no idea if he was ever working on projects like adapting Chew. That aside, from what I can tell, Chew is just another comic you could expect Image, in its current form, to have produced, and I really don't see what the fuss is about here.

Batman: The Killing Joke gets an expensive prestige edition designed like a camera

Digital Camera World wrote about a special edition of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, that's designed like a camera and comes with a possibly unshocking price tag:

The most iconic Batman serial of all time, The Killing Joke, is getting an oversized prestige edition themed like a film camera (with removable lens and leather case) for an eye-watering €15,000 – approximately $17,500 / £13,000 / AU$24,400.

While other caped crusader comics are arguably better (check out The Dark Knight Returns and Year One), what makes The Killing Joke the most iconic Batman graphic novel ever is its cover – featuring a rictus-grinning Joker pointing a camera at the viewer.

Drawn by Brian Bolland, it's one of the greatest comic book covers the medium has ever seen – and it reflects the Joker's twisted use of photography to psychologically torture Commissioner Gordon, in what serves as the villain's most widely accepted origin story.

The 1988 comic, written by similarly iconic Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), has inspired everything from action figures to an animated movie – and now the essential Batman story is being presented in the most prestigious of prestige editions, styled after the Joker's fictitious Witz film camera.

Described by publisher Argent Comics as "the world’s first giclée-printed comic book," only 52 volumes will ever exist – 47 for sale to the public, with 5 archive copies for Argent and DC.

If memory serves, it's also the story where Barbara Gordon was turned parapalegic when the Joker shot her, and what Moore may not have intended as canon per se was soon turned into just that by the editors, with the earliest appearance Babs made in a wheelchair I can recall possibly being an issue of John Ostrander's Suicide Squad, at least 2 years after the Killing Joke was published. While there were decent stories that followed where Babs was in the spotlight like Birds of Prey's first several years, some could reasonably argue whether it was a good idea to just take a potentially questionable story and shoehorn in into continuity proper.

For now, this is yet another speculator market farce in the making, and nobody should be buying this photographing joke just because of the silly design they used on the cover material. And seriously, is Moore really that "iconic" a writer? Not really, and he hasn't been in a long, long time.

The whole "blind bag" craze could backfire

A writer at Popverse says Todd McFarlane's warned that the current insanity of "blind bag" variants which Image seems particularly interested in employing as a "cash grab" tactic could backfire:

The blind bag craze has been a huge win for retailers, publishers, and readers, but one comic legend is warning everyone that things could backfire. If you aren’t familiar, a blind bag is when a publisher sells a comic in a opaque polybag and the customer doesn’t know which variant cover they’re getting. In some cases, customers might get a rare cover. Some comic shops have taken things a step further, creating blind bags where the customer doesn’t even know what series they’re purchasing, encouraging readers to try something new.

Seriously, is that fair and respectable to the customer, to keep it all secret? No, it's not. And what if the blind bags the store creates - concealing something entirely without a title - leads to the customer being ripped off with something awfully woke? In this day and age, it's particularly contemptible of the customers to pull blatant stunts like that if they don't know at all what's inside a bag 100 percent shrouded in darkness the buyer can't see through.

The craze has been a success, with Image Comics & Skybound Entertainment's Invincible Universe: Battle Beast #1 selling nearly 400,000 copies, with the numbers credited to the blind bag initiative. Things have been going well, but Image Comics' president (and Spawn creator) Todd McFarlane warns everyone that the bubble could burst

“If you have something that works that’s valuable, then you can use it for value,” Todd McFarlane says during an interview with ComicPop Returns. “What we historically find out in business, not just comic books, in business, is once something works good, there’s a tendency to milk the cow dry. And everybody just goes, ‘Oh, there’s money to be had. Let’s go.’ And then all of a sudden, you turn the consumer off, and once the consumer leaves, I would argue that’s the hardest thing to ever recover is getting the consumer back. Especially if they feel like they’ve been betrayed somewhat.”

McFarlane himself has taken part in the blind bag trend, as both Image Comics president and creator, with an Image Comics Holiday Blind Bag in 2025. Will blind bags go the way of holographic covers, or are they an important part of the industry’s future?

They should stop in use simply because it's just another gimmick to compensate for dismal sales of pamphlets, when here, paperbacks/hardcovers can offer an alternative with more potential profitability, and easier to sell in ordinary bookstores. And if pamphlets are proving more expensive today to print up, surely that's another reason why it'd be better to make the shift? And 400,000 pamphlet copies, once again, is a huge joke. I'm sure they realize it.

To encourage people to potentially waste tons of dollars over something that may be worth neither monetary nor entertainment value is insulting to the intellect, and I can't see why we even have to encourage people to stick with the pamphlet concept when paperbacks and hardcovers have long become a common concept. I would think even Image, with all their creator-owned products, might've understood that years ago, but as this proves, nope, they never did.

New adaptation of Fist of the North Star said to be unnecessary

Recently, a writer for Tokyo Weekender said the new adaptation of Fist of the North Star, rendered very heavily in CGI, was uncalled for:

CGI in anime is not inherently a problem. The sequel to the Trigun reboot, Stargaze (2026), was 3DCG, which, yes, did make the characters look a bit like puppeteered action figures when they were standing around and talking. But when the action hit, it was a thing of beauty. The camera danced around while keeping the proportions of the characters intact (something occasionally lost with 2D animation), allowing for a whole new world of high-octane anime action. This approach would have been welcomed with open arms by long-time fans of FOTNS and newcomers to the series. Characters looking like they are wearing plastic hair molds on their heads is a small price to pay for transcendental action.

But the fight scenes simply aren’t anything to write home about. The camera work is static, there are no heart-pumping long-take shots where the CGI could really shine, and the whole thing rarely goes beyond Kenshiro delivering a kick or a punch with a bit more fluidity than in the ‘80s anime. But not by much. And, honestly, if we’re comparing the two shows, then the original Fist of the North Star, with its limited animation from well over 40 years ago, does hold up much better than everything that we’ve seen from TMS so far.

Not Taking Full Advantage of the Visual Medium That Is Anime

In the interest of fairness, it’s worth mentioning that the computer-animated Fist of the North Star does follow the manga much more closely than previous anime. So close that some shots from the new show are straight-up computer copies of the manga panels. Here’s the thing about that, though. What works in manga doesn’t always translate well to an animated medium. It’s fine to tweak and add things to adaptations that would have broken the flow of a comic as long as it utilizes the visual medium of animation.

The ‘80s anime understood that assignment well by throwing in occasional flashbacks to some characters’ past, which are only talked about in the manga and the 2026 series. Another way that the old Fist of the North Star improved the story was by bringing in the occasional comic relief a little bit sooner, like with the orphan thief Bat. Eventually, the creators of the manga figured out that a story that’s all darkness, all sadness and all violence all the time would ultimately start to feel repetitive, so they started using the odd gag or absurd situations to offset this. But those weren’t there in the very beginning.

The CGI FOTNS had the benefit of decades of hindsight to consider fixing this but they didn’t, deciding instead to stick religiously to the manga, and the anime suffers for it. It’s an animated series that’s paced like a comic book, and the two do not work well together. Never in a tale of a lone martial arts genius fighting post-apocalyptic murderers — who make Lord Humungus from Mad Max 2 look tiny — should a viewer ever feel, well, bored. And yet here we are.

I've thought for a while that there's way too much use of special effects in live action science-fantasy movies, but this sure gives it a whole new meaning. And then, let's consider the violence is much more graphic here than in the original mid-80s adaptation:

2026’s Fist of the North Star does not have those kinds of constraints. It will show you the inside of a bad guy’s brain within the first few minutes of Episode 1. When the CGI villains explode from within, you get to see in full detail how their heads just open up and spill on the ground. For veteran fans of gory action, the new anime delivers the goods… But, again, it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before. The 2003 – 2004 original video animation (OVA) New Fist of the North Star was partially made to give fans all the gore they’ve been missing all these years. In most places, it’s much more violent than the new anime.

Seriously, while they may make a proper distinction between good and evil, do we really need this kind of vehicle? Hardly. If there's no comic relief here and it perpetuates the modern playbook eschewing brightness for all darkness, that's another huge letdown, and suggests they're pandering more to people who can't appreciate the light. And that's decidedly why it's best to refrain from this new take on Buronson's combination of Bruce Lee with Mad Max.

Why the Mandalorian no longer matters as a Star Wars spinoff

Several years ago, there was a time when some might've thought the Mandalorian TV show was anything but the same kind of woke mishmash that Disney and producer Kathleen Kennedy turned the Star Wars franchise into. But in the years since, after they fired Gina Carano for nothing more than expression of opinion, it's become rather clear any such previous perceptions and receptions of the Mandalorian have changed, and as John Nolte at Breitbart's announced, Disney's not giving a new film extension, Mandalorian and Grogu, any press screenings, if at all:

Fearing lousy reviews, the Disney Grooming Syndicate is reportedly limiting critic screenings for The Mandalorian & Grogu.

“Disney appears to be cutting back on showing the film to critics,” reports World of Reel. “Some journalists are complaining online that they’ve been told by publicists that The Mandalorian and Grogu won’t be screened for critics in their area, which is odd considering no other Star Wars movie has been treated this way before.”

“In fact, quite a few markets will reportedly not have critic screenings, which suggests a lack of confidence on Lucasfilm’s part toward the film,” adds the report.

Tee hee.

There’s even better news… First, some background…

While I don’t blame any studio for doing this — they do have a hundred-million-dollar product to sell, after all — one of the tricks the studios employ to rig the early reviews is to cherry-pick those invited to the first critic screenings. In this case, Disney has two pools to choose from: brainless Star Wars fanboys and the whores who trade their integrity for access.

In most cases, this is a foolproof approach, unless…

The movie is truly awful.

And, well…

#TheMandalorianAndGrogu is one of the weakest Star Wars movies.

An emotionless, predictable experience that doesn't push Din Djarin anywhere interesting. Dull, unexciting fight scenes; just CGI monsters. Action figures mashed together.

A long, colorless made-for-TV movie. pic.twitter.com/DoOpve0fPC

— Jonathan Sim (@TheJonathanSim) May 15, 2026

I guess there's a reason why I concluded somewhere along the way that there's just too much CGI in modern science-fantasy cinema, making it nigh unbearable, and felt animation could avail the genres far better, but Hollywood would rather stick with live action.

It's also worth noting that the guy playing the armored figure, Pedro Pascal, has since also made things considerably worse with his increasingly vicious leftist positions, which have lately culminated in the following:

Actor Pedro Pascal kissed left-wing CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert on the lips and called himself “an actress” while promoting Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu on Tuesday.

“What a pleasure to have you back,” Colbert told Pascal after the The Last of Us star sat down in a chair beside the TV host’s desk during Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to which the actor replied by pressing one finger to his lips, implying he wanted a kiss.

Colbert then leaned in, and the two men kissed each other directly on the lips, eliciting applause among members of the live studio audience.

[...] Pascal then referred to himself as “an actress,” exclaiming, “But I’m an actress! You know what I’m saying?”

This is such a groaner, and it wasn't the first time he emphasized such divisive beliefs. No doubt, his obsessive emphasis also played a part in the failure of the recent Fantastic Four movie, the 3rd or 4th attempt to launch Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Silver Age masterpiece as a live action franchise in films. And IIRC, that was the kind of movie where they forcibly sex-swapped a notable character, that being the Silver Surfer, for all the good it did at the box office in the end.

As for the Mandalorian, it might've had promise when initially launched, but PC tactics ultimately devoured it, as it pretty apparent by now. Carano's dismissal over her right-wing politics undoubtably drove any enthusiastic viewers away too, and now, we seem to be facing a Star Wars spinoff movie where production values are even less than before. I can't feel sorry if this film wilts quickly at the box office by the end of the year, and the Mandalorian itself ends up forgotten by the end of the decade, in no small part due to the PC advocates who ran the production, who had a chance to avoid controversy and sadly didn't.

Another occurance in Venom's series that was uncalled for

Here's a sugary Popverse interview with Spider-Man editor Nick Lowe and writer Joe Kelly about one more thing they've done in Venom #256 (who knew any ongoing they prepared for that character could've gone so long by now?), which was to terminate the Paul Rabin character they shoehorned into the Spidey franchise just to serve as a paramour for Mary Jane Watson at the expense of Peter Parker:

After you have a bad break-up, whoever your ex ends up with next might get a little side-eye from you — for one reason or another. Three years ago in comics, Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker broke up, and the model-turned-Venom MJ has since found someone new in her life in the recently introduced Paul Rabin. This dovetailed into Mary Jane getting stories of her own, leveling up when she became the latest host of Venom.

But all the while, a certain segment of fans has had an unreserved scorn for Paul Rabin — at best, he is not a good fit to be the romantic partner of Mary Jane, and, at worst, he is an ill-fitting 'plot device' to keep MJ out of the magnetism that is her on-again, off-again romance with one-time husband, Peter Parker. But in April 1's Venom #256, the Paul Rabin haters got their wish as he was written out of Mary Jane's Venom series with a surprise (and surprisingly clear) death at the hands of the serial killer supervillain Torment as part of the recent 'Death Spiral' crossover event with the Amazing Spider-Man title.

Ahem. I may not like that C.B. Cebulski and company chose to do this for the sake of keeping Spidey and MJ apart, but that doesn't mean I support "projection" to the point of seeing the character put to death at the hands of the villain I assume was meant to be MJ's father. But don't be surprised if these propagandists have no qualms about making fandom look that bad they'd view a murder as a great thing just because it supposedly paves the way for reuniting MJ and Peter.

After a few weeks for fans to unpack it and to avoid spoilers, we spoke with Paul Rabin co-creator Joe Kelly (writer of Amazing Spider-Man), and Spider-Man group editor Nick Lowe to talk about it. Apparently, the idea to kill Paul Rabin originally came up as a way to add to the death total of 'Death Spiral,' but in it, they found a deeper story — and finale — for the Paul Rabin era.

"There were some pillars of the story that were there from the beginning," Kelly tells Popverse. "Once we were like, 'body count, body count,' we wondered who we were taking off the board. I don't remember if it was Al [Ewing] specifically who said it, and we were all like, 'Yeah, it's kind of a good moment.'"

"I think it may have been [Venom editor] Jordan White who suggested it, and then Al thought of the timing, or something like that," Lowe adds. "And we all were talking about how it's got to happen just to hurt the most, and to have the most complex emotional toll for all of it."

"Especially if he goes out trying to do something good," adds Kelly.

So that's what this whole story was about - mass death trails. Just another reminder what's gone wrong with the modern era, where horror supplants comedy and romance. As for "doing something good" before being sent to the great reward, unfortunately, it's too late to impress upon anybody now with that kind of angle, especially when the stories they've concocted are so jaw-droppingly contrived and forced. Besides, the chances they'll actually reunite Peter and MJ as a married couple at this point are very low.

Since Paul Rabin's debut in 2022's Amazing Spider-Man #1, and a four-plus-year romance with Mary Jane, all the while in the orbit of her ex, Peter Parker, it seems almost every Spider-Man and Venom comics reader had an opinion on the character. While some characters find it hard to gain traction with fans, Paul Rabin was what pro wrestling fans would call a heat magnet; readers either loved him or hated him.

For Nick Lowe, who has spent 25+ years inside Marvel Comics editorial and seen (and in many cases been a part of) several superhero stories that provoked this kind of reaction, he knew it was there - and that there would be a triumphant release of emotion for the 'Paul haters' at this moment.

"We were not shocked in any way by the reaction," Lowe says. "If anything, the Paul haters out there... being vocal is not their problem. The Paul supporters have also been vocal. They're not as large as one might expect the population, and much of it was tongue in cheek, but we knew it would be a big moment and get a big reaction from a good portion of the fandom."

"I don't really look at these things, but I expected it," Kelly adds. "The little birds out there tell me it was quite a day for a certain corner of the internet."

That's exactly the problem. They don't make any distinction between good or bad responses, what matters to them is if the audience pays any attention at all. Which beggars the query: doesn't merit matter? Alas, not to such PC advocates. Interesting they bring up how long Lowe's worked for Marvel, because one could say he came about at the beginning of the end for whatever was left of Marvel's merit, and it wouldn't be a shock if he were a prime choice of Joe Quesada to serve as one of the editors for writers like J. Michael Straczynski, who of course turned out some of the shoddiest Spidey stories, right down to the whole Sins Past debacle.

Before you ask if Mary Jane and Peter Parker will end up back together, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's a Spider-Man family mystery happening, and, oh yeah, a landmark Amazing Spider-Man #1000 to come.

What a shock. As noted before, of course nobody expects a serious reunion under such disgraceful frauds, one more reason why there's no longer any ability to celebrate a landmark 1000th issue. A similar point could be made about Superman and Batman's 1000th landmarks. And all the while, the publishers are still nailed on the whole notion that serial fiction like this can only be published as pamphlets, and never solely as paperbacks/hardcovers.

And if there's something else about the late Gerry Conway worth noting, it's that it's a terrible shame that, among the things he did a 360 degree on in the past decade or more, he also threw MJ under the bus, and all that after he'd gone to all the trouble of killing Gwen Stacy in 1973 just to prepare the groundswork for pairing up Peter and MJ as a couple. Conway, to my knowledge, never panned Quesada and company for where they took everything with Sins Past and One More/Brand New Day, and one could reasonably ask, why would the guy want to take all the paths he did back in the Bronze Age if he didn't have any respect for the characters, as his refusal to speak against the modern management suggests? I realize Conway wasn't the only one who let down entire fandoms with his PC positions; there's plenty more. But that's why we're at such an abyss today, and it's not bound to improve anytime soon.